Mauri McKitrick: Follow the light - a photo essay.

by Mauri McKitrick

All my life I have sought out the small moments where light and dark become one. The entire universe feels present, warming my heart and undoubtedly bringing a smile to my face. Photography allows me to capture this microcosmic space. I seek the story nature has to tell from the hidden secrets that lie, and as long as our senses are awake it awaits us.

Photography is a dance with the sun and shadows, always seeking that perfect golden light. I suppose it’s a game I play with nature, except we both win the moment we align just so. Nature has always been God to me. My ritual for many years has been to sit and watch the sunset, a new canvas painted every day as I ponder the depths. Camera in hand, my heart swells as the rays illuminate the clouds into shades of pink and orange striking against the azure sky.

When I discovered that Ayurveda is essentially a medicine of balancing opposites, I immediately had to know more. Ayurveda to me is one in the same as my photography, looking into the elements of nature to find synchronicity. Nature is the purest teacher. One day I was at the coast and the wind blew so strong that I thought I might get blown away. But I rooted my feet there anyway as the sun fell into the sea. Alongside me, a bird floated in the air using the wind to stay in place. Then it came to me that we too must allow the wind, vata, to carry us rather than flapping our wings against it. Such teachings surround us in the vastness of every day.

But sometimes the wind defeats the bird. Sometimes the shadow drifts over the leaf. In my dreams I’ve yet to take one photograph. Something is always awry, and the camera never works right. It goes like this: the mountain meets the sea meets the valley meets the waterfalls meets me always fumbling trying to capture it all. These dreams are like the thousands of photographs I take that never capture the perfect golden light. This struggle lies in the depths of a flower. When I hear the petals and see the whisper, I’m wholeheartedly bound to lean in.

BIO:

Mauri McKitrick is an Ayurvedic Practitioner and mama to her gorgeous daughter Ariya in Portland, OR with a passion for seeing the God of Small Things through her lens.

She runs a massage studio in Portland called the Golden Room. It offers traditional massage and will include Ayurvedic treatments and counselling come autumn.